Driving Force

Danny Heitman’s recent TimesOp-Ed discusses the failed but high-spirited attempts made by Marianne Moore to name a car for Ford in 1955. Moore’s suggestions—the Intelligent Bullet, the Ford Fabergé, the Mongoose Civique—were all rejected, and the car was dubbed the Edsel. It was also around this time that James Dickey worked as a copywriter for the McCann-Erickson ad agency in New York.

“These days, poetry and commerce are rarely on such good speaking terms,” writes Heitman. Not entirely. Ada Limón is a poet who also happens to be the creative director of advertising at Travel and Leisure magazine. She’s responsible for those ubiquitous taxi-top ads currently urging New Yorkers to “Please Go Away.” I wrote to Limón to ask her about her two professions. She responded:

I’m always surprised that there aren’t more poets working in advertising, marketing, or copywriting. If there are a lot of them, they’re hiding. I think, as poets, or as creative writers in general, we don’t like to talk about making a living. We like to talk about art.

And speaking of her art:

I’ve always written a lot about billboards, shop signs, all those words that inundate our lives every second we walk down the street. I was endlessly interested in those messages from nowhere. Then I realized, they didn’t come from nowhere, they came from writers: writers who knew how to sell something.

How the “Please Go Away” campaign came to be:

My publisher and associate publisher wanted something that would spur people to travel and something that could be co-branded with the magazine and an advertising partner. The tricky part was that the message had to fit on taxi tops. Which meant you had to be able to read it in one to three seconds. I wanted it to be clever, or at least have an attitude. I mean, if it was going to be on 500 taxi-tops, we had to feel like it really had an energy to it. I brainstormed with my Art Director, who is my partner in all things creative, and we went from “Go On Get Outta Here,” to “Go Away” to finally, “Please Go Away.” I still get excited when I see one on the street. People must think I’m crazy, I yell, “Please Go Away” and point like a loon. It probably sounds really simple, but it’s not. The process is usually long and involves getting a lot of things wrong. Not unlike writing poems.

On Moore’s effort and naming cars:

I like the idea of naming cars after animals. The Mustang is a cool name, the Viper, the Barracuda.

I wonder if anyone ever thought to name cars after poetic terms:

“Hey what are you driving?”

“Oh a new Ford Sonnet”

The Saturn Stanza The Honda Haiku The BMW Lyric The Nissan Anaphora The Fiat Elegy

Okay, now that might be crossing a line…no pun intended. I’d definitely drive a Toyota Canto.